An Unfinished Film

The critically acclaimed new film by renowned Chinese dissident Lou Ye (The Shadow Play) combines fiction with real footage from the pandemic. This blend allows the director to recall the panic of the early days of COVID-19 in a flawless but humorous and affectionate way. Exaggerated tension, anxiety, isolation and seemingly frozen time: locked in their rooms, the members of the film's crew interact through digital screens and improvise in their new everyday.

By pushing the boundaries of traditional cinema, Lou Ye not only looks at a creative processes mired in total chaos, but also attempts to grasp the deeper implications of the pandemic for China and the world at large.
In this meta-film, set in 2019, director Xiaorui and his team discover material of a long-forgotten film that was abandoned a decade ago. The story, which tells the story of love between two men, and the poetic images take the director back to his youth. Fascinated and nostalgic, Xiaorui decides to reunite people who worked on the film and finally finish it. As the filming starts, their hard work is interrupted by the outbreak of COVID-19. With the entire production team confined to a hotel, reality inevitably changes the form and content of the film.